Jason Locasale @LocasaleLab

I stopped for a bathroom break and came out three hours later with a brisket sandwich and a new worldview.

Freddy🇩🇪 @FreddyLA7

18 hours ago

DUDE LMAO THIS IS A GAS STATION😭😭😭

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I do think overprescription of antibiotics and antibiotic resistance are major issues. I have not looked deeply into how severe the resistance problem is. My expertise is more in metabolism and health. One thing that has always puzzled me is how the gut microbiome became one of the trendiest topics in health research over the last 15 years while relatively few people seemed interested in the obvious question of how antibiotics interact with it. We know antibiotics dramatically disrupt the gut microbiome. It seems entirely reasonable to ask whether widespread antibiotic use could have long-term consequences for health, including potential contributions to rising rates of colon cancer in younger people. Unfortunately, NIH is not structured to ask and answer these kinds of questions. It is much better at expanding existing research programs than rapidly investigating uncomfortable questions that challenge mainstream medical practice.

Eddie Tennison @TennisonEddie

a day ago

@LocasaleLab As a practicing dentist I worry the very most about antibiotic resistance as a major problem on the event horizon. I don't know if that's a potential topic for you Jason, but I value your take, if it is.

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I bought the high-fiber, zero-sugar Pepsi at Costco on clearance and it was actually pretty good.

Aman @AmanHasNoName_2

2 days ago

If someone can fit 20g protein into a can of Diet Coke without changing the taste and texture , that recipe will make a bigger IPO than Anthropic.

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Universities continue to believe that good public relations can conceal their decay. MIT spent more than a decade purging dissenters, driving out some of its most accomplished scientists, and rewarding mediocrity, conformity, bureaucracy, and careerism. Now it seems to think a few flashy patriotic advertisements are enough to restore public trust. They still do not understand the problem. We are not fooled.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) @MIT

2 days ago

As we celebrate 250 years of American independence, we are reminded that MIT was founded in the same spirit: to advance knowledge, foster innovation, and serve the country through education, research, and discovery. understanding.mit.edu

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Great article. A major lesson from Dr. Bhattacharya’s story is that truth cannot be determined by institutional authority. Science advances through skepticism, debate, replication, and evidence. The moment institutions begin declaring what may and may not be questioned, science starts becoming something else.

Justin Hart @justin_hart

a day ago

The Man They Tried to Silence Now Runs the NIH rationalground.com/p/the-man-they…

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Small grants go a long way when institutions provide the infrastructure they are supposed to provide. Faculty salaries, staff support, student stipends, tuition, core facilities, postdoc fellowships and admin support should not all be pushed onto grants. I have watched people run 20-30 person labs (producing almost nothing in the lab) with a single R01 because they had access to enormous slush funds attached to their administrative positions. Others with similar grants struggle to support any lab at all.

@CondaLab-UNMC @condalab

a day ago

@LocasaleLab Your post makes sense, ut how can things get fixed? I believe endowments should not exist but rather be used to pay infrastructure and salaries. Also, limit the # of bureaucrats will help. But many grants are not enough $$ (i.e. R03 or R21), even if a PI is in hard mo ey

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Thank you ❤️ Universities have endless ways to move money around. It’s all one big pot until someone asks for accountability, then suddenly every dollar is restricted, earmarked, and impossible to touch.

Rebecca gunn @GuRenn1198

a day ago

@LocasaleLab UNC admin (EA) 14 yrs in “interesting” depts. CH native. So appreciate your posts. Oracle introduced as transparent in 2012. People Freaked! So over years layered with other apps to obscure. So many shenanigans and none held to account. Maybe topic?

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The problem is the fairy tale universities and their academic medical centers sold to the people they recruited. These positions were never supposed to exist in this form. NIH should never have enabled universities to treat faculty as grant-chasing mercenaries whose purpose is generating indirect cost revenue. NIH enabled university medical centers to expand without limits using this model that allows them to offload the cost. Scientists were convinced it was reasonable to be hired as faculty while being responsible for their own salaries and receiving minimal institutional support. Meanwhile institutions with billions in annual revenue somehow find money for seven-figure administrators but not for the scientists they employ. The result is a system where faculty spend their time writing grants and paperwork rather than doing science, while universities collect overhead and tell the government on their effort certifications that they are spending time on research when they are not. They are spending time on grant writing and paperwork. If a university wants to hire a scientist, it should pay that scientist’s salary. Everything else is a scheme to extract money pretending to be a research enterprise.

Katayoun Ayasoufi @KAyasoufi

a day ago

The reality is that most of us are already applying for 30 or 50 grants per year and getting none. Not sure more limits is better. Also no one can really support their own salary (like we have to), their staff's, and all the research costs on 400k/year. American science is dying

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If Apple can admit Siri is trash after 15 years and replace it with something that works, universities can change too if they have accountability.

Peter H. Diamandis, MD @PeterDiamandis

a day ago

Apple spent 15 years telling us Siri was the future. At WWDC on Monday, they finally revealed the future: it's powered by Google Gemini. The stock fell 5%. That's not a pivot. That's a confession.

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tldr: People are obsessing over a $200 antibody while ignoring the multi billion-dollar system that rewards weak science, punishes skepticism, reinforces narratives and turns speculation into dogma.

Mischaracterized reagents are not the main source of bad science. A typical paper in a major journal represents years of work, dozens or hundreds of experiments, multiple model systems, and hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in funding. A $200 antibody is one small component of a much larger body of evidence. I have not examined this case closely, but I would be shocked if the central observations underlying cellular senescence rise or fall on a single reagent. How relevant cellular senescence is to aging and cancer remains an open scientific question. The existence of senescent cells is a undoubtedly a real phenomenon. We just do not know how important they are. However, the hype from Science journalists and the negative influencers focusing on ragebait surrounding this antibody issue would have you believe the entire concept is an artifact. The more important question is how much senescence contributes to aging and cancer, and that remains a matter of legitimate scientific debate. Unfortunately, that debate is impossible to have when the literature is dominated by positive findings, grants, papers, and careers are contingent on supporting those findings, and skepticism is treated as hostility rather than an essential part of science. What concerns me more is the biomedical system’s inability to distinguish between foundational discoveries and derivative or irreproducible work, between scientists who generated durable insights and those who propagated weak narratives. Narratives become self-reinforcing for decades without meaningful accountability. Scientists who challenge prevailing ideas struggle for funding, publication, and career advancement. Scientists who reinforce prevailing ideas are rewarded with grants, citations, promotions, and influence. The most damaging scientific work is sustained by institutions such as this journal that do not revisit their assumptions, do not reward generalizability and reproducibility, do little to penalize those who repeatedly publish weak, derivative or irreproducible work, and never hold influential scientists accountable when they are wrong. The result is that flawed ideas persist for decades, consuming billions of dollars, training generations of scientists on these bad ideas, and shaping entire fields long after the underlying evidence should have been questioned.

Matt Kaeberlein @mkaeberlein

2 days ago

Pretty interesting story in @ScienceMagazine this week on what looks like a serious problem in the senescence field. More than 400 papers apparently used the wrong antibody for p16-INK4a — an antibody that actually recognizes a completely different, unrelated protein (a

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Every university says it supports academic freedom and due process. None are willing to restore the scholars they drove out when doing so was popular. This is one of the central tests universities continue to avoid. If institutions want the public to believe they have changed, it is not enough to issue statements about academic freedom. Academics who were punished, sidelined, or pushed out for expressing lawful views must be restored and made whole. Until that happens, claims of reform are difficult to take seriously. I have seen little evidence that universities are willing to revisit these cases or acknowledge the mistakes that were made.

Robert P. George @McCormickProf

2 days ago

Dear Harvard: It's not too late to right the wrong done to Carole Hooven. Please invite her to return to her teaching post at the University. Not only would it rectify an injustice, it would send a signal that Harvard honors academic freedom and intellectual integrity and no

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What topic should I discuss next? Reply below or send me a message. The best ideas usually come from people closest to the problem.

The claim that universities are no longer taxpayer funded requires a very creative definition of taxpayer funded. Student loans, federal grants, Medicare, Medicaid, tax exemptions, tax-advantaged philanthropy, and subsidized borrowing all flow through the university. Tuition is enabled by federally backed student loans. Research is federally funded. University hospital systems derive enormous revenue from Medicare and Medicaid. Tax-exempt status enables donations, borrowing, and real estate expansion. Regardless of direct state appropriations, the university business model is built on taxpayer-supported foundations.

Tim Michael @tbmichael

2 days ago

@LocasaleLab Most states shifted to a revenue model two decades ago - the overwhelming majority of university money comes from student fees and tuition payments, not as tax allocation

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Universities had a moat until the late 1990s because they were the repositories of knowledge. Over the next two decades that moat eroded. The internet made information widely accessible. AI now makes expertise widely accessible. Universities struggled to find a new identity. Rather than focusing on knowledge creation and dissemination, they evolved to maximize cash flow through a variety of taxpayer subsidies. Marketing and branding replaced their traditional role as centers of knowledge. Scientists became minor players inside organizations that still market themselves as temples of scholarship.

David States MD PhD @statesdj

4 days ago

@LocasaleLab Not all that long ago universities had a monopoly on academic knowledge. Very few people had access to research center libraries or access to faculty. AI changed that. Now anyone can ask an esoteric technical question and get a relatively competent answer in seconds.

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The NIH is not a subsidiary of the pharmaceutical industry. The fact that biotech and pharma executives are expected to mobilize whenever NIH faces reform is a big part of the problem. NIH exists to serve the public interest, not the interests of an industry that has grown accustomed to treating it as a subsidy.

John Maraganore 🇺🇸🇬🇷🇺🇦 @JMaraganore

3 days ago

Completely agree @RepAuchincloss! Since NIH seeds much of biomedical innovation for patients, private sector biopharma leaders must speak out here!

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This hit piece writes as if the Secretary of HHS is supposed to personally manage every corner of a $2 trillion bureaucracy. If positions remain vacant, it is evidence of incompetence. If they are filled quickly, the appointees are dismissed as cronies and political hires. Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t. The real story is that much of HHS is extraordinarily difficult to reform. Congress, the courts, and the entrenched interests involving DC's permanent influence networks have spent decades building systems that are resistant to change. Any attempt to alter them generates a coordinated attack campaign for the status quo to remain exactly as it is.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg @SherylNYT

4 days ago

NEW: Major posts are vacant. Waves of scientists are gone. Ebola looms. How RFK Jr. manages HHS: “If the C.E.O. lacked deep expertise in the company’s business and the leaders of its most important divisions were missing, investors would revolt." nytimes.com/2026/06/07/us/…

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Longevity influencers discovered the secret to eternal life: never stop podcasting.

The fastest way to learn how much an institution values its principles is to watch what happens when one of its golden boys gets into trouble. I'm sure Hotez’s career in his university will proceed unscathed regardless of how this metoo case unfolds.

Breanna Morello @BreannaMorello

3 days ago

🚨LAWSUIT🚨 Peter Hotez is being accused of sexually misconduct after he allegedly pursued a Northwell Health scientist that ended up rejecting him. Annette Lee says Hotez, who is married, proposition her repeatedly. In Lee’s wrongful termination lawsuit she says, "Dr. Hotez

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